Rice Size Computers Prove That Implants Are a Good Thing....

For years Engineers have spent countless hours reducing complex machines - never has that statement been more true than that of the computer.  

As the size of the processor reduces, inversely proportional does the technology innovations increase.  For example, the capabilities of today's smartphones rival that of supercomputers of back in the day which impressive back then would be hard pressed to run Call of Duty without serous lag with poor graphics.

On  May 11, 1997, when Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful computer in the world. It boasted a performance figure of 11.38 GFLOPS and could evaluate 200 million positions on the chessboard each second prevailed  against world chess champion, Garry Kasparov with a score of 2:1 in a 6-game match.

Today, the ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU inside the Exynos-based Samsung Galaxy S5 outputs 142 GFLOPS. And the 192-core GPU on the Tegra K1 SoC produces an even more impressive peak of 364 GFLOPS. In short, in terms of brute, number-crunching power, these mobile phones process at such speeds as if Deep Blue was a speak and spell.

Enter Michigan Micro Mote (M3), which by all standards is the world's smallest computer. How small? It's about the size of a grain of rice, a scale in cubic millimeters. The computer has wireless, computational capabilities, storage, temperature and pressure sensors, and motion and imaging features.  

Kaustubh Katdare in Crazy Engineers said on Wednesday, "It requires no special imagination to understand that as more things get connected with each other, the size of computers operating behind the scenes must be smaller." He said "the Michigan Mote opens up new avenues towards the world of Internet of Things (IoT)."

They designed the system with their students.  The computer is built in stacked layers. The One layer is the radio, one later is the microprocessor, and another is the battery.  On the top there is a solar harvesting module which is used to interface with the system.  Initializing the computer is as simple as shining ambient light on the computer.  Once the battery is charged, then flashing a sequence of light can program the system to initialize and turn on the radio.  Once radio communications are established, more complex instructions can be stored and processed.  

They communicate through a universal interface protocol, MBus. Just by exchanging one layer with another, a new sensing system is achieved. The computers can collect and transmit data as far as 2 meters; they can monitor a room for motion or anomalies in pressure and temperature, and communicate that data to a base station. Blaauw said the work ahead is getting the sensors to talk to one another and extend range to about 20m. David Wentzloff, another faculty member behind the computer, is leading the effort to increase its ability to communicate over longer distances, said the report.

Solar cells power the battery with ambient light, said the university report detailing the work and features of this computer. Therein lies a key word in this story, "battery," or what the engineering world refers to as the size/power matchup. "As you shrink down in size," said Blaauw, the percentage of the system tends to be dominated by the battery. It's actually not hard to make chips small, but it is hard to make them low power. We could have very small chips, but we'd still end up with really large batteries."

They use a 1mm2 solar cell producing 20nW. The device can harvest enough energy under ambient light to run perpetually. Standby power consumption is 2nA, "a million times less power than the average mobile phone consumes while on standby."

The ultimate goal is to reduce the computer to where it can be small enough to be placed in a biological cell for medical procedural enhancements.  Regardless, the use of nano computers are limitless.

Source:

• http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14950/worlds-smallest-computer-michigan-micro-mote/
• http://phys.org/news/2015-04-hey-youre-flicking.html

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 22 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

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